If 100% of My Sales Come Through Online Sales Counselors. Should I Restructure OSC Pay?
Noooooo! Not unless you are going to pay them MORE!
I keep seeing this over the past year, as more and more traffic for new home builders comes to your online sales counselors. More leads are being set into appointment because there is less walk-in traffic. Some builders are having “heartburn” over how much they are paying their online sales counselor. Especially for appointments. WHHHYYYYY?
Why would you penalize your online sales counselors for refining and perfecting their job?
Marketing is doing their job by driving the right leads to your OSCs. (Planting the seeds.) OSCs are doing their job for driving the right appointments to the site agents. (Growing the leads.) And site agents are doing their job by selling those appointments! (Picking the flowers!) So why would you try to break the system by taking money out of the pockets of the people who are sifting through you leads and touching at least 30-60% or more of the people buying your homes?
Even if you were to go to a 100% appointment only model, you would be doing a disservice to your company to restructure the pay for OSCs so that you are paying them less. If an onsite sales agent has a banner year and makes 100K, 200K, or 300K or more, you wouldn’t start looking at restructuring their pay. So why would you do that to the OSC?
We need to lose the attitude that this is a customer service role like the AT&T operator who talks you off a cliff when you call over your incorrect bill. That’s not what an OSC does. We need to lose the attitude that this is a sales support role. OSC’s aren’t the site agent’s secretary or their assistant. They are essentially inside sales taking the marketing leads and developing them into viable sales leads. This is a skilled position. Just any old secretary can’t create the relationship building, the rapport and the trust that happens with a skilled, well trained OSC.
The more and more leads that are sent off to the OSCs the more they have to juggle. Make sure you provide them with support by growing their department, implementing the best tools, and make sure you know how to run an OSC department. The OSC department is different from a sales team. Make sure you reward them for the work they are doing, it will go a long way in creating a happy healthy company culture, and will drive sales higher and higher.
If you don’t believe me on how hard they work, I dare you builders, VP of sales, or otherwise to give your OSCs a week off and take the phones and their emails for week. Then you will see they are worth every penny you pay them, and then some.